The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

After he left she tipped the medals into the range fire. A few days later she raked out the ash, and for a moment was unsure what the melted slag in her hearth pan was as she threw it into the chook yard. Nineteen years later the great fire of ’67 swept through, taking all before it. The hop farm, now run by her son, her timber home and his newer brick home, the photos of her and Jack, all went in the flames. And over half-buried slag that had once been medals in what had once been a chicken pen a new layer of ash deposited itself. After more years passed, there grew out of it water ferns and dogwood and myrtles, until what had been the dream of Jack’s life was a forest and the forest dropped leaves and bark and branches, and over more time the ash disappeared under more layers of rot and peat and new life. She married a younger man who was good to her and she to him, but it was not the same thing as Jack Rainbow and she had been. He died in a tractor accident and so she outlived him too. Near the end of her life, she realised she could no longer remember what Jack looked like. Nor what he sounded like, or smelt like, or how he had held her and caressed her, slowly puffing on his Pall Malls while the snow fell outside. Sometimes she thought she smelt the smoke of his Pall Malls as she fell into sleep. Sometimes she remembered a room humming. But she could not hold the smell or the thought or the sound, and sleep was taking her somewhere deeper, ever further away. She was t...

He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth.

And what we cannot dream we can never do.